by J. L. Myers
“She should have woken by now,” Dorian muttered. I could hear shuffling. No, not shuffling. Pacing. Then a distinct thud followed by something shattering against a solid surface. “Have you even left this room in the last two days?”
“No.” A broad hand cupped over mine, squeezing. “Troy said the tranquilizer should have worn off by now.” Kendrick’s voice, and he was speaking right beside me. The hand covering mine squeezed again. “But that’s under normal circumstances.”
“Her injuries weren’t that bad.” Dorian sounded like he wanted to hit someone.
The pacing started back up as a door creaked open. Someone barefoot padded over soft carpet. “That’s true,” Mom said, her voice broken. Her steps neared my other side. “Her physical injuries have long since healed with the blood transfusions. Though no amount of blood can heal a broken heart. Only time can do that.”
Behind my eyelids, I saw Ty. His body was draped over my lap, his face a mirror of pain, his breath a rasp from his throat. Against my cheek his hand lay. It trembled like a leaf in a gentle breeze while his thumb grazed my bottom lip. A ghostly smile parted his lips. “I-I…l-love you, Amelia. I w-will always…l-love you.”
“Ty, no!” I clutched his shoulders and shook violently. “Don’t say that. Don’t say goodbye.” Yet as my words swirled on a repeating echo around me, Ty’s face began to fade. His body had turned limp in my hands and his eyes rolled back to the whites. With the release of breath from his throat, the sudden compacting weight of his body followed. The sight of him disappeared like a puff of black smoke.
“Ty!” I screamed, throat raw as ground meat. The heaviness of my body was returning, the light of reality hauling me back. Striking pain pierced my heart, like a lance spearing through my chest to come out clean on the other side. In its wake was a gaping hole that would never heal. One that would never close up. Excruciating pain crippled my entire body, flourishing like flesh-eating acid from my shattered heart outward. It engulfed every bone, every vein, and every inch of my flesh. I knew what was about to happen. I was waking up, my conscious mind forcing my lids to flutter against dim room light. Forcing me to leave the horrific memories of Ty’s death. There was nothing I wanted less than to wake, to leave this dreamlike state behind. What awaited was a world that had been robbed of Ty. My life would never be the same without him. To know that I would never be able to see Ty’s face, or hear his voice like I just had in these heartbreaking but lucid dreams? It was worse than reliving the scene of his death over, and over. I wasn’t ready to leave, to let go. I wasn’t ready to give Ty or his vivid memory up.
“No!” I screamed and flailed, striking and fighting. “Don’t leave me. Ty!”
Hands pressed my wrists back, pinning them against soft pillows. “Amelia, it’s okay.”
“NO!” Using my whole body, I thrashed out. “Ty, no!”
The restraints against my wrists released. Arms flung in a split second to wrap around my body, drawing me close and squeezing. Lips found the crown of my hair, and pressed down. “Shh.” Kendrick’s cool breath ruffled my eyelashes. “I’ve got you.”
My body’s thrashing was useless. Against Kendrick’s strong arms, mine were as weak as a child’s. I stopped fighting, limbs trembling with exertion and the excruciating pain that radiated from my shredded heart. Tears filled my eyes and I squeezed them shut, clinging to Kendrick’s sides with desperate hands. “He’s gone.” I struggled to breathe and clutched the amulet in a tight fist. “He’s dead.”
A smaller and more delicate hand found my back and began moving in slow circles. “I know, sweetheart. I know…”
We stayed like that for a long while, Kendrick’s arms holding me, and Mom’s hand continuing its gentle support. After what felt like an eternity of struggling through the incessant waves of pain, I somehow slowed my hyperventilation and took a steady breath. I drew from Kendrick’s hold, still crying unending tears. We were in my bedroom, dark-purple drapes drawn and chandelier extinguished. Light glowed from the black-velvet lamp at my bedside. Kendrick was on the edge of my bed, his arms loosened but still holding me. Mom sat on my other side, expression riddled with relief and grief all at the same time. Her eyes were puffy as hell. Dorian stood across the carpeted space at the door, hand gripping tight to a manila envelope. Behind him, my mirrored dresser was crammed with bouquets of flowers. There were red and white roses, purple lupines, and white and black calla lilies. More flower pieces decorated the floor space around the dresser, growing outward like a living garden. There was also a smashed vase beside Dorian’s bare feet. The smash I’d heard earlier.
“Who are all the flowers from?” My voice sounded hollow and far away.
Mom leaned forward and patted my knee. “They’re from your true followers. The ones that came to witness your coronation, and…” Her words broke off with a deep unsettled sigh.
I knew what she had been about to say. “The ones who didn’t die at the hands of the damned.”
“Yes.” Kendrick drew me back against his chest.
Tears kept rolling down my face, an unending supply that refused to stop. I swiped them away and looked from Dorian to Kendrick, then to my mom. “I want to see him. I want to see Ty.”
Dorian moved closer, looking at Kendrick then Mom, an evident question cast from his eyes. His concern shifted to me. “Amelia, don’t you remember?”
Kendrick’s grip around me tightened and his lips met my hair again. “He died.”
I jerked away and shook my head. Like I hadn’t been there when it had happened? Like I hadn’t just relived the torture in my own nightmares? My fists clenched. “I know that.” Then they unclenched. I wasn’t angry with them. “I do. I just…”
Using the back of my hand, I wiped the wetness from my face and jaw. Fresh billowing pain surged from my heart, rawness swamping down to my stomach. So much of me wanted to believe that he wasn’t gone, that there was still something I could do to…save him. I chocked on a sob, tasting acid spike my throat. I know you can save me. Ty’s faith in me hadn’t even wavered with his dying breaths. And I had failed him.
I cleared my phlegm and acid-filled throat, and sniffed back the snot that clogged up my nose. My blurry vision rose to Mom. “Please, I need to see his body.”
There was a moment of tension-fueled silence. Mom’s expression strained while she shared a tight-lipped frown with Dorian and then Kendrick. “Ty’s funeral is today,” she said, her gaze returning to me. “You’re not invited.”
~
Kendrick diverted his lingering gaze from the rearview mirror, where Dorian sat, silent and motionless. That was at least ten on my count since we snuck out of the house. A conspicuous look came my way. “You know your mom will kill you when she finds out you’re gone.”
Beyond the moving car it was daylight. Gated properties rushed past on one side and ocean scenery was a blur on the other. For once it wasn’t raining or snowing.
“We’ll be back before she wakes up. She’s not going to find out,” I said, tone narrowing on a warning. “Isn’t that right, Dorian?”
On the outside I was a reflection of strength and stability. But inside? I was drowning, organs swimming in acid that made my head, stomach, bones, and heart feel as though they were being eaten alive, melted slowly from the inside out. The agony had been escalating from the second I woke, from the second I remembered exactly what I had lost. Kendrick, of course, could feel the depth of my emotional wounds. They radiated like poison through our bond. Still he knew me, maybe even better than I knew myself. Now wasn’t the time to talk things out. Instead we were heading to Ty’s funeral, against my mom’s forbidding command.
A tidal wave rolled my stomach and I strained my throat in an attempt to keep rising vomit from pouring up. Ty is dead. The horrific reality made me wonder if this could just be a terrible nightmare. My worst fear come to life. But I wasn’t that lucky. The pain of his loss alone proved that.
I threw a glance over my shoulder to my brot
her. Since my insistence to see Ty to say goodbye before his body was surrendered to the ground, he hadn’t spoken a word. “Dorian?”
My brother flinched, eyes straining harder than they had been the second before. He frowned, focus tearing from the blank A4 envelope in his hands and up to me. “Huh?”
“I said…” Then I stalled. Dorian’s expression was guarded and his fingers were clinging to that envelope in his tight hands for dear life. I twisted further in my seat and pointed a finger. Giving into my slight curiosity, I pleaded, to who or what, I wasn’t sure, that whatever was in his hands would distract a twinge of the torture I was living. “What is that, anyway?”
Dorian’s gaze slid up to the rearview mirror then back down. His expression tightened. As if looking at me caused him physical pain. In the same instant I saw Kendrick exchange a cautionary look with my brother. Then the link to his thoughts and feelings shut off. “Nothing you need to worry about,” Dorian said.
“Yeah,” Kendrick chimed in, voice way to cheery to be anything but put on. “Let’s focus on getting through today. We can worry about everything else, later.”
There’s more? The viscous blow of accepting that Ty was dead was already more than I could take. My continued involvement with him had been the catalyst that had delivered him into the vengeful path of Caius’s sword. It was more than I could live with. More than I wanted to live with. And now there was more? Would it upheave our lives further? Did it have to do with…Ty?
With widened eyes, I shot a look at Kendrick. His focus was trained intently through the windshield at the sun-speckled road. His thoughts were still unreadable, a vault closed and the dial spun. Still there was no way in hell I was about to let this go. And if either Kendrick or Dorian thought I would, then they had seriously forgotten who I was. I glared at my brother. “I have a right to know. Tell me what’s in that envelope.”
“Not now,” Kendrick warned. His narrowed eyes flared as he glowered into the rearview mirror at my brother. Then they softened to settle on me. His hand shifted from the leather steering wheel to cup my knee. “Amelia, please. There will be plenty of time for this, later. Right now you need to mourn, to think of and remember Ty.” At my venomous look, his hand retracted, palm up. “I know how painful this is for you. You know I do. And the question you’re asking has nothing to do with him. I promise you that.”
I gritted my teeth. Whether the information was related to Ty or not, it clearly had something to do with me. Good or bad—probably the later given the distant look in Dorian’s eyes—I needed to know. I snatched the envelope from Dorian. It came from his grasp that had seemed so tight and desperate, as easily as if he hadn’t been holding it at all. We may never have had that eerie connection twins shared, but I still knew him. He wanted me to know what hid within this flimsy yellow covering that couldn’t have held more than a few single pages. “Tell me what’s in here,” I said to Dorian. “Or I’ll find out myself.”
Dorian drew in a long breath and expelled it. “The envelope holds blood test results.”
I thought of Ty, wondering if they had tested his blood after his death and discovered he was a hybrid. Though I couldn’t think of any reason they would want or need to test his blood in the first place. “Whose results are they?”
Dorian yanked at the navy scarf around his neck, worrying at the frayed end. “They’re Caius’s, Mom’s, mine, and yours.”
I frowned. Why test our blood? My brain felt sluggish, unable to conjure the answers. All I could see when I kept thinking back was Ty, his chest sliding free from Caius’s scarlet-painted sword before crumpling to the red and black slicked council ground. I fought the need to shudder. There was no turning back now. He had to tell me. “Why?” I demanded. “I don’t understand.”
Kendrick pried my hand from the edge of the envelope. “The Council needed to prove or discount your mother’s claim.” A grimace pinched his face. “Don’t you remember?”
The fragmented pieces of memory splintered, then shot back together. Mom had leaped between Caius and me. I screamed at her to move, threatening to kill her too if she didn’t. Still my unwavering threat hadn’t dispelled her, hadn’t freed my attack of Caius’s sword ready in my hand. Instead she had clung to my arms, pleading for me not to kill him. But why? My internals lifted, as if I’d plunged off a cliff, free falling. I clutched at my throat, struggling to find air in the Cabriolet’s small cab. “My father is…is Caius.”
At my words, Dorian turned a ghastly shade of gray. The deadpan look across his face was alien, and terrifying. I had never seen him look so vacant before, so totally lost. Dropping the envelope I spun on my seat, knees pressing into the backrest. Desperation made me want to reach out to him, to soothe his turmoil. But the stillness of him sitting there, not looking at me, not looking at anything, kept my fingers pried around the edge of the leather seat. “My God, Dorian. What is it? What’s wrong? Please, you have to tell me.”
Dorian didn’t even budge, and it was Kendrick who spoke. “The tests proved that you are both natural-born royals. You were never turned vampires.”
After all the obstacles we had needed to break through, especially when Pure Blood had been required to open the locked door to the cell corridor below the Portsmouth Council, I had suspected that I was somehow a royal. Though I’d only thought Caius’s experiments had modified my DNA and blood. Being a born royal hadn’t even crossed my mind. Now I knew the truth. Caius was my biological father. My stomach churned like milk turning to butter. Had Caius forced himself on our mom all those years ago? I recalled her trust in him, the way she gained strength at his touch when she’d revealed us all to be vampires. Then I remembered Caius locking her away during the battle. There was something between them. There always had been. I’d seen it in my vision of Dorian’s and my birth.
Another revelation hit me like a bullet between the eyes. “A-Athobry,” I stammered. It was the name our mom had said was our fathers. Which wasn’t a total lie—if you rearranged the letters. How could we all have been so blind? “It’s an anagram for Bathory.”
With this new sickening notion to deal with, on top of everything else that should have rendered me crazed and screaming, a question formed on my lips. Part of it came from Dorian’s statue-stiff form. The rest resulted from feeling the roadblocks in Kendrick’s mind that remained as solid as a foot-thick fortress of steel. “Kendrick? Dorian? What aren’t you telling me?”
Dorian’s chin rose, expression lost and alone. Trepidation tightened my chest. His silver-blue eyes were glazed, but not reddened with tears. His grief here was bigger than the day I’d revealed Marika’s treachery. It was personal and forever life changing. “Caius is your father,” he said on the breath of a whisper, holding up the results for me to see. “But he’s not mine. And that’s not all…”
Bewildered by stiff silence, I sat staring through the windshield but seeing nothing. Dorian wasn’t Caius’s son. If that were the only drowning revelation, it would have been enough. But there was more. So much more. There had been a fourth set of blood results that had been rushed after the first three were reported. This fourth blood test was my mom’s. It revealed a number of interesting facts. One confirmed that she was in fact a turned vampire. This collaborated Caius’s claims that he had turned her, as did my vision of the act. Still I wanted to believe he’d somehow compelled her to think it was necessary. Yet after everything we now knew, it couldn’t be true. Mom had to have been involved.
The second and much more gripping reveal, was that our mom’s maternal genetic markers which matched my DNA, were not even close to matching Dorian’s. Dorian, my twin, the boy who’d been my brother since my first breath of life, was not even related to me. He wasn’t biologically my brother. Our mom wasn’t our mom. She was mine. Only mine.
Shaking my brain free of cobwebs, I twisted, reaching out to clasp Dorian’s hand. “I don’t care what those stupid results say.” I glared at the envelope now repositioned on his lap, as if it
were the culprit for this chasm between us. “Blood or not, you are my brother. Nothing can ever change that.”
Dorian shrugged. His expression wasn’t as blank as before, but it was just as wary. “Sure. Whatever.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
With a crunch of gravel the scenery surrounding us cleaved into focus. The Cabriolet had stopped moving. Surrounding us were parked cars, a church…and a hearse. The two brick levels with spear-shaped windows reflected the doom-lacking, fluffy clouds above.
Without a word, I exited the car and slid around the side of the building. We hadn’t been invited to the funeral and wouldn’t be welcomed, even if hell did freeze over. With Kendrick and Dorian waiting, shielded by a canopy of magnolia trees, I scaled the outer wall to the second level. Each sliding step tightened my lungs, like a vice was closing around them. I wanted so badly to slip through one of the speared windows that marked the church’s entire west side. I wanted to get as close as possible to Ty’s gold coffin. To see his human face and run my fingers across his cheek. To imagine he was just sleeping and not a decomposing shell of the boy I still and always would love.
From this position, I could make out the open lid over the heads of people lining up to pay their respects. But I couldn’t risk it. Couldn’t get close enough to whisper those three powerful and undying words to him, hoping he’d hear it beyond. A werewolf’s sense of smell was second to none. It would only take a whiff to alert them of my presence. And the soaring church was packed to the brim with them. From what I could see, everyone had honey-glazed irises marking them as werewolves. Yet to my surprise, not all were black haired and tan.
“Are they all…?” I whispered, throwing a glance down at Kendrick and Dorian. It was late afternoon and the wintery sun, though weakened, was clear from any shielding clouds as it dipped low. Lace-work shadowed over them from magnolia branches, and I could feel the tingle that touched Kendrick’s flesh at the ultraviolet light. “Werewolves?”
